WIRED went hands-on with Nintendo’s favorite banana-eating, wall-smashing hero. The game, which gives Switch 2’s lineup some much-needed variety, is available July 17.
The US Senate has voted overwhelmingly to remove a moratorium on states regulating AI systems from the Republican “big, beautiful bill.” Legislators agreed by a margin of 99 to 1 to drop the controversial proposal during a protracted fight over the omnibus budget bill, which is still under debate.
The vote followed failed attempts to revise the rule in a way that would placate holdouts, particularly Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), one of the moratorium’s first opponents. Over the weekend, Blackburn struck a deal with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would have cut the moratorium to five years and allowed states to continue enforcing AI laws that handled online child safety as well as individuals’ names, images, and likenesses. But after a day of furious backlash from the populist right, driven primarily by MAGA internet powerhouses Steve Bannon and Mike Davis, Blackburn relented at the last minute — and chose, instead, to attach her name to a Democrat-sponsored amendment that sought to remove the bill altogether.
“While I appreciate Chairman Cruz’s efforts to find acceptable language that allows states to protect their citizens from the abuses of AI, the current language is not acceptable to those who need those provisions the most,” she said in a statement on Monday night. “This provision could allow Big Tech to continue to exploit kids, creators, and conservatives.”
Early fellow GOP defectors included Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME); Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), an anti-tech hawk; and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who raised concerns about federal overreach. But ultimately, nearly everyone agreed on removing the AI provisions — the lone vote against it was from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). The Senate must still vote on the budget reconciliation vote, after which it will return to the House before being passed to President Donald Trump’s desk.
The House of Representatives quietly lodged the first draft of the moratorium in its version of Trump’s funding megabill, passing it almost entirely along party lines by a vote of 215-214 in May. The stated goal was to avoid a patchwork of state AI regulations that could inhibit industry growth. But the plan was contentious even before the Senate began formal debate on its version, which required states to avoid regulating AI and “automated decision systems” if they wished to receive funding for broadband programs. It became a flash point in an already heated fight over the bill, resulting in furious backroom negotiations, an apparent deal, and then a daylong concerted effort to tank the bill.
Senate Republicans had already fractured over several amendments inside the bill, but the addition of the AI moratorium turned the whip count into a trainwreck of competing interests — particularly within the Republican faction normally opposed to Big Tech and federal overreach. In a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) last week, several GOP senators, including Hawley and Paul, joined Blackburn in voicing their opposition to the bill for varying reasons, including their concern that it would automatically curtail preexisting state AI laws. (Tennessee, for instance, passed a law in 2024 that protected individuals’ likenesses from being used by generative AI.)
On the other hand, Cruz, the chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and widely considered as a hard-right figure, authored an amendment that would have specifically barred states with AI laws from accessing federal funds earmarked for AI development.
The moratorium has proven especially unpopular with state-level GOP figures: last week, 37 state attorneys general and 17 governors bombarded Thune with letters urging him to drop the clause. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Trump’s former White House press secretary, went so far as to author a Washington Post op-ed denouncing the bill as removing states’ abilities to protect their own citizens. Other critics contended that the bill’s definition of “AI” is broad enough to ban entire swathes of software- and internet-related regulations, including Republican-backed state-level online child safety laws.
As promised, the first trailer for director Edgar Wright’s take on Stephen King’s novel The Running Man is here — and it looks like a playful throwback to ‘80s action movies.
The story centers on a struggling man named Ben Richards, played by Glen Powell, who is a contestant on a mega-popular TV game show where he’s hunted by trained killers, and earns more money the longer he stays alive. The goal is to last a whole 30 days unscathed, which typically doesn’t happen. Oh, and basically every citizen is trying to catch him as well. Despite the dark premise, the trailer has a fairly lighthearted tone, mixed in with all of the death and destruction.
In addition to being helmed by Wright — who is best-known for movies like Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World — the new movie also includes a pretty large and notable cast. That includes Powell in the lead role, alongside Katy O’Brian, Daniel Ezra, Karl Glusman, Josh Brolin, Lee Pace, Jayme Lawson, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, William H. Macy, David Zayas, Sean Hayes, and Colman Domingo.
Of course, this isn’t the first adaptation of the book. It follows Paul Michael Glaser’s film from 1987, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and had something of a post-apocalyptic-meets-American Gladiators vibe.
The latest version of The Running Man also isn’t the only dystopic King adaptation in the works right now. The slightly slower-paced novel The Long Walk is also coming to theaters this year from Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence. It premieres on September 12th.
The Running Man is scheduled to hit theaters on November 7th.
One way to think about the tech industry is just as a series of people trying to build stuff they saw in movies. Ready Player One helped kick of a flood of interest in the metaverse, despite the movie's deeply dsytopian undertones. If you've talked to anyone working in AI, they've surely told you about the assistant in Her, despite that movie's dystopian undertones. From the gesture interface in Minority Report to the hand-phone from Total Recall to just about everything from Back to the Future and Star Trek, you really can't underestimate how important and inspirational these movies and shows are to the tech imagination.
On this episode of The Vergecast, a bunch of us try to figure out which tech we actually want to use. David is joined by The Verge's Allison Johnson, Jennifer Pattison-Tuohy, Mia Sato, and Victoria Song - aka the hosts of Hot Girl Vergecast Summer, coming to a feed near you for the next couple of months - to draft their way through the movie, show, and game tech they'd want to make real.
Several moments of my two-hour hands-on preview of Donkey Kong Bananza felt like I was playing the gritty 2009 action game Red Faction: Guerilla - except this time I was actually playing as a gorilla. For example, I had to level a multistory building during a timed minigame. Just like in Guerilla, I targeted the load-bearing columns with Donkey Kong's ripped arms to quickly bring it down. Reveling in the destruction made me feel equal parts satisfied and sinister, all while Donkey Kong struck a goofy pose.
Other times, I could sense a direct throughline from Super Mario Odyssey and other major Nintendo franchises. The way that Donkey Kong can roll into a jump (and roll at the top of a jump) feels like maneuvering with Odyssey's Cappy, while exploring the heights and depths of sublevels and experimenting with physics is reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. But through it all, the new Switch 2 game coming out on July 17th feels, above all else, like it's breaking new ground as its own thing.
Bananza is an open-world platforming RPG, complete with a skill tree that you can chip away at as you collect banandium gems. Finding five of them grants you one skill poi …
Apple has accused a former senior Vision Pro engineer of stealing thousands of documents containing plans for unreleased features, and taking them to his new role working on glasses–based projects for Snap.
A lawsuit alleges that Di Liu claimed he was quitting his job for health reasons, hiding from Apple that his true plan was to join the SnapChat developer in a “substantially similar” role …
The MLS Season Pass price is now $49 for the remainder of the season, which lets subscribers stream all MLS regular season and playoff games, live and on-demand. The price drop reflects the fact that the 2025 season is about halfway finished.
As always, Apple TV+ members get an additional discount: MLS Season Pass is now just $39 if you are a TV+ subscriber. The monthly plan price is unchanged.
Most enterprise apps used on macOS don’t come from the Mac App Store, so IT teams are stuck managing them manually. That includes tracking down the latest versions, packaging them up for deployment, setting up the required permissions, and making sure they’re installed and updated properly across every device. It’s a tedious process that doesn’t scale well, and it introduces security risk when apps fall behind on security updates. Addigy aims to solve this by adding a new Prebuilt App Catalog, which is now available to all its device management system customers.
